PUBLISHED ; Even though Prime Ministers (PMs) are the central actors in parliamentary democracies, little comparative research explores what makes them perform successfully in office. This article investigates how the political careers of PMs affect their performance. For this purpose, we make use of a unique expert survey covering 131 cabinets in 11 Central and Eastern European countries between 1990 and 2018. Performance is defined as a two-dimensional set of tasks PMs ought to fulfill: first, managing the cabinet and directing domestic affairs as tasks delegated to their office, second, ensuring support of parliament and their own party, who constitute the direct principals. The findings indicate that a simple political insider career is not sufficient to enhance prime-ministerial performance. Rather, PMs who served as party leaders have the best preconditions to succeed in office.
Are prime ministers held accountable for their government's performance? The personalisation of parliamentary elections and subsequent voting behaviour based on the personality of party leaders questions the accountability of elected governments. In this article, I analyse the confounding of prime ministers' leader effects by voters' evaluation of government performance to examine whether prime ministers are held accountable for the performance of their government. I use individual-level data from British, Danish, and German elections and a natural experiment at the German state level to show that voters hold prime ministers personally accountable. The findings constitute an important extension of electoral accountability and have implications for the study of personalisation and presidentialisation in parliamentary democracies.
When and why do voters change their evaluation of party leaders? Voters' evaluations of party leaders are an increasingly important determinant of electoral behaviour. Which factors influence these evaluations of party leaders? Do voters evaluate party leaders who hold the office of prime minister differently from other party leaders, and do electoral campaigns and issues change these evaluations? I use a multilevel growth model with panel data from the United Kingdom to analyse effects over time. I find that campaigns play a significant role and that voters' stance on Brexit has a considerable time-varying effect. In addition, voters use economic performance as a valence signal for party leaders holding the office of prime minister and therefore hold them accountable for bad economic performance, especially during election campaigns. These findings show that the personalization of politics may endanger the democratic function of elections to a lesser extent than is commonly feared.
This doctoral thesis contains four empirical studies analysing the personal accountability of prime ministers and the electoral presidentialisation of parliamentary elections in European democracies. It develops the concept of presidentialised prime ministerial accountability as a behavioural element in the chain of accountability in parliamentary systems. The ongoing presidentialisation of parliamentary elections, driven by changes in mass communication and erosion of societal cleavages, that fosters an increasing influence of prime ministers' and other leading candidates' personalities on vote choices, has called performance voting – and the resulting accountability mechanism of electoral punishment and reward of governing parties – into question. This thesis analyses whether performance voting can be extended to the personal level of parliamentary governments and asks whether voters hold prime ministers personally accountable for the performance of their government. Furthermore, it explores how voters change their opinion of prime ministers and how differences in party system stability and media freedom between Western and Central Eastern Europe contribute to higher electoral presidentialization in Central Eastern European parliamentary elections. This thesis relies on several national data sources: the 'British Election Study', the 'German Longitudinal Election Study' and other German election surveys, the 'Danish Election Study', as well as, data from the 'Forschungsgruppe Wahlen'. In addition, it utilises cross-national data from the 'Comparative Study of Electoral Systems'. The findings contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate on the issue of accountability and electoral presidentialisation in parliamentary systems by providing extensive evidence on prime ministerial accountability under presidentialised electoral behaviour. Keywords: presidentialisation; prime ministers; voting behavior; accountability; personalisation. ; Diese kumulative Dissertation umfasst vier empirische Studien welche die persönliche Verantwortlichkeit und die elektorale Präsidentialisierung parliamentarischer Wahlen in Europäischen Demokratien analysieren. In dieser Dissertation wird hierzu das Konzept der präsidentialisierten Verantwortlichkeit von Premierministern, als Verhaltenselement in der Kette der Verantwortlichkeit in parlamentarischen Systemen entwickelt. Die voranschreitende Präsidentialisierung von Parlamentswahlen, welche durch Veränderungen in den Massenmedien und Erodierung sozialer Konfliktlinien verursacht wird, befördert den zunehmenden Einfluss der Persönlichkeit von Premierministern und anderen Führungspersonen auf Wahlentscheidungen und stellt auf Performanz basierendes Wahlverhalten – und den daraus resultierenden Verantwortungsmechanismus aus Belohnung und Bestrafung – in Frage. In dieser Dissertation wird analysiert ob auf Performanz basierendes Wahlverhalten in parlamentarischen Regierungen auch auf der persönlichen Ebene stattfindet und die Wählerschaft Premierminister persönlich für die Performanz der Regierung verantwortlich hält. Zusätzlich wird in dieser Dissertation untersucht warum Wählerinnen und Wähler ihre Meinung über Premierminister ändern, sowie ob Differenzen in der Stabilität von Parteiensystemen und Freiheit der Medien zwischen West-Europa und Zentral-Ost-Europa zu einer höheren elektoralen Präsidentialiserung bei Zentral-Ost- Europäischen Parlamentswahlen führen. Die Datenlage dieser Dissertation basiert auf unterschiedlichen nationalen Umfragen: der 'British Election Study', der 'German Longitudinal Election Study' sowie anderen deutschen Wahlumfragen, der 'Danish Election Study', und Daten der 'Forschungsgruppe Wahlen'. Zusätzlich, bedient sich diese Arbeit der länderübergreifender Daten der 'Comparative Study of Electoral Systems'. Die Befunde dieser Arbeit tragen zur aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Debatte über die Problematik elektoraler Verantwortlichkeit und Präsidentialiserung parlamentarischer Systeme bei indem sie extensive Belege über die Verantwortlichkeit von Premierministern unter präsidentialisiertem Wahlverhalten bieten. Schlagworte: Präsidentialisierung; Premierminister; Wahverhalten; Verantwortlichkeit; Personalisierung
Candidate selection is one of the most relevant tasks of parties and has important consequences for various aspects of political representation. While previous research has addressed many important aspects of the candidate selection process, we know little about the question of which candidate characteristics are preferred by party members. We address this research gap by conducting a conjoint experiment among more than 300 local party leaders in Germany. In the experiment, potential candidates differed on various important dimensions regarding their socio-demographic background, prior political experience, local roots, and work within the political party. We find that prior political experience and engagement within the party are the most important features. However, socio-demographic characteristics and deviation from the party line also matter. These findings have implications for theories of descriptive representation as well as the impact of decentralization on party cohesiveness.
Even though the question of who governs has been at the centre of political science research for a long time, a systematic comparative analysis of the profiles of prime ministers in Europe was missing. This data rich volume allows to put prime ministerial figures into perspective. Scholars will welcome the inspiring arguments on the careers of top executives. -Patrick Dumont Professor of Political Science, Australian National University, Canberra. This is a formidable contribution to the study of prime ministers. Building on a unique database, this book shows that the nature of prime ministerial leadership has been drifting towards a more assertive role of chief executives vis-a-vis their own parties. It shows that the control of political parties over the process of government has been declining while political leaders have gained political weight. -Thomas Poguntke Professor of Comparative Politics, Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf, Germany This book presents the first comparative analysis of European prime ministerial careers. It is the result of an ambitious data collection effort and presents significant cross-temporal and cross-national changes in the experience that prime ministers bring to the highest office. The book will, without doubt, become a key reference work for the study of executive careers. -Petra Schleiter Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Oxford, UK This book examines the changes in the career experiences and profiles of 350 European prime ministers in 26 European democracies from 1945 to 2020. It builds on a theoretical framework, which claims that the decline of party government along with the increase of populism, technocracy, and the presidentialization of politics have influenced the careers of prime ministers over the past 70 years. The findings show that prime ministers career experiences became less political and more technical. Moreover, their career profiles shifted from a traditional type of party-agent to a new type of party-principal. These changes affected the recruitment of executive elites and their political representation in European democracies, albeit with different intensity and speed. Ferdinand Muller-Rommel - Professor (Emeritus) of Comparative Politics at Leuphana University Luneburg, Germany. Michelangelo Vercesi - Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Leuphana University Luneburg, Germany. Jan Berz - Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Even though Prime Ministers (PMs) are the central actors in parliamentary democracies, little comparative research explores what makes them perform successfully in office. This article investigates how the political careers of PMs affect their performance. For this purpose, we make use of a unique expert survey covering 131 cabinets in 11 Central and Eastern European countries between 1990 and 2018. Performance is defined as a two-dimensional set of tasks PMs ought to fulfill: first, managing the cabinet and directing domestic affairs as tasks delegated to their office, second, ensuring support of parliament and their own party, who constitute the direct principals. The findings indicate that a simple political insider career is not sufficient to enhance prime-ministerial performance. Rather, PMs who served as party leaders have the best preconditions to succeed in office.
This expert survey applies and measures a novel concept of prime-ministerial performance that refers to the tasks a prime minister is theoretically expected to fulfil for making parliamentary democracy work. Prime-ministerial tasks are derived from a theoretical framework, which conceives parliamentary democracy as a two-directional chain of principal- agent relationships in which prime ministers are agents as well principals. For each country under study, we asked about twenty country experts to answer these questions for all cabinets in an online survey. The survey was fielded in eleven Central-Eastern European countries between November 2018 and April 2019, with a total of 215 experts. Most experts worked in academia or as journalists and came from various academic disciplines (Political Science, History, Economics, and Sociology).
